Giant Elk

Giant elks, also known as giant stags, were a rare species of unusually large Elk that stood some seven feet at the shoulder and weighed in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred pounds. They dwarfed their common relatives to a degree that made early encounters with the species easy to mistake for sightings of some altogether different creature. They favored temperate forest habitats, as Deer generally did, and were known to range mainly through forests, though their overall scarcity meant that confirmed populations were seldom mapped with any precision. When threatened or provoked, a giant elk relied on its antlers or the sharp edges of its forehooves, and they had very few predators outside the likes of Saber-Toothed Tigers or Dire Wolf packs.

Their rarity lent the giant elk an outsized place in the folklore of the cultures that shared their forests, many of which held it taboo to hunt the animal at all. A sighting was rarely treated as a mundane matter of natural history; it was more commonly read as an omen, said to foreshadow some event of consequence, up to and including the birth of a future king. A smaller number of traditions went further still, holding that Celestial deities were inclined to manifest on the Prime Material in the shape of a giant elk, a belief that did little to discourage the taboo against hunting them and likely did a great deal to reinforce it.